Glynda's Lesson
by milesmorales
Summary: Glynda teaches many students, but four of her first also taught her a most important lesson.


Don't get too attached to your students, they had said. You're their teacher, not their friend.

It was not advice Glynda Goodwitch needed.

She was not an unkind person, but even at her young age words like strict, formal, and professional superseded open, warm, and friendly by a great margin. Her friends were few and her profession was easily the most important thing in her life. No one, least of all the newly minted professor thought there was any reason to worry.

She had not originally wanted to be a teacher. She was at the top of her class, excelling at both her studies and combat, and was set to join the ranks of Huntsmen and Huntresses, a profession she could gain great acclaim for. Instead, it was one of her own professors, an enigmatic man with gray hair and a youthful look that belied his age, who convinced her to educate the next generation. Two years of training later, she was prepared to teach her first class.

They did not seem that remarkable on paper. There were good students and poor students and everything in between. None of them were hopeless cases, not that Glynda believed in such a concept anyway, but there was a quartet that was clearly going to be trouble: the unfortunately named Team TOAD.

Tengri, Olam, Aesir, and Dilmun. An entire team of high test scores and low grades, chronic underachievers whose records had the word disruptive in large, bold letters. Capitalized. And underlined.

Still, Glynda was not one to hold a person's transcripts against them. Whatever their past teachers thought of them, she told herself, she was the one evaluating them now. Everyone came into her class with a clean slate and would be given the opportunity to prove themselves.

They had all managed to earn detention within the first twenty minutes.

They weren't bad kids, just disruptive and inattentive. Dilmun spent the period drawing and showing off his doodles, Aesir and Olam were talking in quiet whispers interspersed with hysterical giggles. Tengri had behaved well enough until the other three had received detention and then started interrupting Glynda's lecture by yelling out jokes.

He would later confess he only did it because he thought a leader shouldn't leave his team behind, a reasoning Glynda approved of but wished he could express in a more constructive manner.

TOAD took detention as seriously as class and wound up earning another day's worth before the first day was done in addition to an essay on the importance of discipline and self-control due at the start of the next week. They accepted it with good humor at least and calmed down to a reasonable level when they were working. The threat of more work probably played a part in that.

On the third day they stayed behind after class and asked if they could use her room to work on their essay. She'd said of course, though she didn't know why they didn't just use the library or their own dormitory, and the five settled in to work. Glynda with student evaluations and TOAD with punitive busywork.

They asked again the next day and the day after that and again and again Glynda agreed. She was worried at first that the group would distract her from her work, but she found the background noise strangely pleasant and that weekend when classes were out she found herself turning on the radio to have something to listen to while she reviewed the next week's lesson.

The next week they turned in their papers but still lingered after class, claiming a need to do some work for one of their other teachers. Glynda let them stay. It didn't matter to her, she told herself, and if it got them to do their work, any work, then it was something she would support.

It wasn't terribly productive time, from what Glynda overheard, but they were putting in some effort and day after day went by where the five of them would spend an extra hour or two together.

The semester went on and Glynda learned a lot about her students from overheard conversations. Movies they had seen or were looking forward to, their taste in music and food, Aesir's almost unhealthy obsession with the Vale City Ursas and why exactly he thought Grifball was a superior sport to Capture the Tower.

Glynda's role in these conversations was largely as a passive observer, only there to keep them from getting too rambunctious or to remind them that she was a teacher and that perhaps some of their more illicit weekend activities should be left unsaid while in her classroom. Sometimes during particularly heated arguments between the boys she would be used as the final arbiter, the judge who would settle an issue once and for all.

This typically resulted in even more impassioned debate and good natured accusations of favoritism.

The one thing she didn't hear much mention of were friends outside of their team. A few old stories of people from back home who were close to their hearts, but far from their selves. Glynda would think of her own friends and classmates who had graduated with her and gone on to bigger and better things. She could relate.

Outside of class they would always smile and wave and call out a greeting whenever they passed in the hall and Glynda would nod politely and carry on. Other teachers would comment on the team, lamenting their poor discipline and inability to focus on work. Glynda would shrug and say they just needed a special touch and could do wonderfully when given the right direction.

The teachers couldn't argue with that. As the semester went on TOAD's grades did improve, and improve remarkably, and while they were never at the top of the class no one could say they were wasting their potential any more.

At the same time Glynda found her own work taking more time to finish. Evaluations and tests that had once been completed before she went home now found themselves stacked neatly on her living room coffee table. She wasn't falling behind, she was just finding herself more distracted, more entertained, during work hours.

When the next semester rolled around she was neither surprised nor disappointed to find the four boys had again signed up for one of her classes.

She'd smiled and told them they were always welcome to hang out in her room after class, whether they were it or not, they didn't have to sign up for her again. They replied they couldn't _not_ take their favorite teacher's class. Glynda felt a catch in her throat and thanked them from the bottom of her heart.

Every semester saw them coming back and filling seats in her classes. They started asking her if she would join them on weekend excursions, but she always firmly, but politely, declined. There was a line, she'd said, and it was not to be crossed.

Late one night Glynda heard a knock on her door. Standing outside was Olam, drenched in rain and looking for a place to stay the night. Team TOAD had gotten into a fight, a real one this time, not one of their uncountable harmless arguments. She let him dry off and left a pillow and a blanket on the couch. He fell asleep quickly, but Glynda had difficulty and found herself checking on him in the night and watching him sleep.

The next morning she called team TOAD to her office and while it would be several days before they were back to normal, she made sure they were on speaking terms before they left. Glynda told Ozpin what had happened, as a matter of course, and asked for advice in handling the situation. Ozpin just took a long sip from his mug and said the matter seemed to be well in hand, but that Glynda should be careful. Being too close to students could be harmful.

It was too late for that, of course. Glynda knew that. She would get care packages from the students' parents and cards every holiday. At the school dances the boys would melodramatically ask her to dance and just as dramatically show how wounded they were at her refusals. Still, the quartet were performing well and were on track to graduate on schedule so Glynda had to wonder how much basis there was for worry.

What harm could there be?

Graduation day came and while there was never any doubt Glynda breathed a sigh of relief when TOAD crossed the stage to receive their accreditations. She was proud of them, as were their families who were all excited to meet the famous Miss Goodwitch their boys kept talking about. After much cajoling they managed to finally drag her out to dinner, after only four years of asking.

It was loud, everybody was talking over one another except Glynda who was content to sit and listen and laugh at the stories and jokes being told around her. It grew late and one by one the families excused themselves, dragging their boys with them. Glynda hugged each one in turn and whispered her congratulations until she was sitting alone at the table.

They wrote her often, long letters scribbled on notebook paper in between missions or while out on long patrols. Photographs and newspaper clippings of their exploits slowly filled a scrapbook she kept tucked away under her coffee table. Postcards came in from the far away cities and settlements, including one from a dingy strip club with the words "wish you were here" scrawled across it.

She rolled her eyes, but kept it with all the others.

The wedding invitation was most surprising. Tengri, of all people, was getting married in Mistral. She tried to get the time off, but the date landed in the middle of test week and international travel made it completely impossible. She settled for buying the most expensive item on their registry and sending a long, hand written letter congratulating the happy couple.

It was raining two months later when four black envelopes were delivered to her door.

It was raining the day of the funerals.

Some days it felt like the rain never let up.

The envelopes joined the letters, postcards, and pictures, stuck ungraciously in the back of the scrapbook. The scrapbook itself was banished to the top shelf of a hall closet and sat there gathering dust for her to walk past every day without a glance. She stopped listening to the radio while she worked and would instead go through her paperwork in silence, sitting alone at her table.

They had told her not to get too attached to her students.

She was supposed to be their teacher, not their friend.

It was advice Glynda had needed.


End file.
